7 steps to restore trust in science – step 3

February 22, 2010

Publish negative results and unsuccessful experiments too. Sherlock Holmes knew that dogs that don’t bark can be as important as those that do. Science progresses as much through negative results as through positive, but it can be hard to get negative results published. This means that those outside of science are only able to see part of the picture. And it can also lead to duplication of effort by scientists themselves, testing ideas that have already been shown to be false.